Orchestra tunes up for busy season

According to Cao Jiwen, branding director of the Xi'an Symphony Orchestra, the concert will bring a dialogue between classical music and contemporary art, and will take audiences to a fresh musical and visual experience.

Mussorgsky's 1874 piece, Pictures At An Exhibition, is a tribute to his late friend, the versatile artist Viktor Hartman. In 1928, Russian-born artist Wassily Kandinsky created an Art Total performance based upon Mussorgsky's Pictures At An Exhibition, in which he combined music, painting and staging. Cao says that the version by Xi'an Symphony Orchestra and Tan will see a combination of the music piece with videos and photos of Kandinsky's paintings.

Other highlights of the Xi'an Symphony Orchestra's 2021 season will see its chorus performing under the baton of conductor Enrico Sartori with programs of classic arias from Italian operas. These include Witches' Chorus from the opera, Macbeth, and Coro a bocca chiusa (Humming chorus) from Giacomo Puccini's opera Madam Butterfly. International musicians, including conductor and violinist Augustin Dumay, pianist Martha Argerich and tenor Javier Camarena, are scheduled to perform with the orchestra this year.